Audition

by Barbara Walters

  I stayed with Jackie for the surgery. It went well, although there was a strange side effect. I sat with her in the recovery room after the operation, and she kept repeating, “I’m so sick, I’m so sick”—but she never stuttered. Not once. The stutter had disappeared. To this day I don’t know why.

  I remained with Jackie for two days after her operation. Then I had to leave for Milwaukee to make a long-scheduled speech, after which I planned to return immediately to my sister in Florida. I was backstage at the convention hall, waiting to go on, when I got a call from Jackie’s doctor.

  “I have terrible news,” he said. “Your sister got out of bed to go to the bathroom and had an aneurysm. There was nothing anyone could do. She didn’t suffer at all.”

  My God. Jackie was dead? It couldn’t be! She had seemed weak when I kissed her good-bye, but all the signs were that she was recovering well. I was numb with shock. And guilt. What was I doing in Milwaukee instead of staying by my sister’s side? She’d died all alone. I, too, was alone in that dreary backstage room as the waves of guilt and sorrow hit me simultaneously. I sobbed, trying not to make any noise. No one heard me. And then I dried my eyes and went onto the stage to make the speech.

  What does that say about me? I don’t know. Maybe I don’t want to know. I just did my job, which seems to be what I do no matter what the circumstance. Maybe it’s the way I cope. I didn’t tell anyone in the convention hall that my sister had just died. I gave a terrible speech and was criticized for it. I didn’t give a damn.

  Jackie was dead. My difficult, temperamental, tragic, loving sister who had played such a huge role in my life. I remembered all the mean thoughts I’d had about her as a child and the frustration I’d felt toward her as we grew older. Then there were the decisions I had had to make for her as we became adult women. Had I made the wrong decision having her surgery in Florida? Would she have had better treatment in New York?

  Merv sent his plane to Milwaukee to take me back to Florida. We buried Jackie in the same cemetery as my father. We have a family plot there, and it is where I’ll eventually be buried as well. My cousin Selig and his wife, Marvel, flew down from New York for the graveside ceremony performed by a local rabbi. My aunt Lena came, as did my cousin Shirley, along with her two sons. A few people came from the Hope School as well. It was a very small, sad group.

  I decided not to tell my mother that Jackie had died. Her mental state was confused enough, and I knew that my sister’s death would be too difficult for her to deal with. As it turned out, to my surprise, my mother rarely asked me about Jackie and when she did, I lied. I told her that Jackie was staying with Carol Channing in California. My mother, knowing that Carol had always been very kind to Jackie, accepted that and seemed satisfied. To make sure that my mother did not find out about Jackie’s death from anyone else, I told only my closest friends and asked them to keep it a secret. I was afraid the media would find out and report it, and that could lead to someone in the nursing home saying something to my mother. I gave up consolation for discretion. It was a poor substitute.

  My mother’s condition continued to deteriorate, and her periods of lucidity grew shorter and shorter. I flew down to see her once a month and brought along my daughter as often as possible. Sometimes my mother knew who I was, other times she didn’t. “Who are you to me?” she’d say over and over. And I would say, “I’m your daughter. Barbara.” Somehow she always knew that Jackie was Jackie. She had a very strange kind of selective memory. Sometimes she didn’t even know who she was. “Who am I?” she would say. “Well, Grams, who do you think you are?” Jackie would lovingly tease her.

  When she did recognize me, she would beg me to take her out of the nursing home and bring her back to New York. I spent hours discussing it with Shirley and finally decided, now that my sister was gone, I could do that. But I decided not to move her into my apartment. Merv and I were engaged. He was virtually living with me, and I worried about the strain on both of us if we lived with my deteriorating mother and round-the-clock nurses. Instead I took a suite for her in a hotel across the street from the apartment, staffed it with nurses, and visited her every day. But she was unhappy there.

  It was a decision I still go over in my mind. I think, Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps I should have brought my mother into the apartment. These are ghosts that don’t go away.

  In the midst of all this, Merv and I got married. True to form, I had twice postponed the wedding. The first time was in the fall of 1985. I began to have doubts and didn’t go through with it. Then we were supposed to get married during the Christmas holidays in Aspen. Again, I couldn’t go through with it. I had growing reservations about Merv. He was wonderful company for the most part, but he could be very moody, and that cast a cloud over our relationship. I also worried again about the instability of marrying someone in show business. I tried to convince myself that Merv was primarily a businessman, the same rationalization I had adopted before marrying Lee. But just as Lee had produced one Broadway flop after another, Merv had already branched out into making forgettable and not very successful movies. There were rumors that his company might be in trouble. How could I repeat that mistake?

  But my biggest concern was the bicoastal life we would have to live. In spite of the fact that my friends all truly liked Merv and he seemed to like them, he really didn’t like New York. He had been born in California and lived there all his life. It was home. As for me, I didn’t think I could move full-time to California. I couldn’t do 20/20 from there. It would have meant giving up my career. So we decided we would spend ten days together in New York, ten days together in California, and ten days apart. I was able to make arrangements with 20/20 to pretape the program the weeks I would be in LA. I rationalized that for two busy people our schedule might even make for a better marriage, but in my heart I worried. The arrangement might work for a year or two, but for a lifetime? Planes? Plans? Time differences? Separations? How many years could we go on like that?

  As it was, Merv was already beginning to come to New York less and less. And I was staying less often in Los Angeles. When I was there we spent most of our free time with his grown children, whom he wanted me to really get to know. I liked them very much, but it meant that Merv and I had little time to really sit down and talk. The truth is, we didn’t have that much in common. He was a great athlete. He liked to play golf, tennis, and ski. I did none of those things. I liked to read and see friends. Merv had few friends and reading was not a great pastime.

  On Tuesday, May 6, 1986, I flew to California to break off our engagement. Why do I remember the date? Because we got married four days later. The sun was shining when I arrived, the garden was blooming, and Merv was charming and funny and tan and handsome. What was the matter with me? Jackie already considered herself his daughter. Her feelings for Merv meant a great deal to me and might even have tipped my decision.

  So on Saturday, May 10, 1986, I became Mrs. Merv Adelson. Just like that. Fast, so I couldn’t change my mind again. I didn’t even have a dress. I borrowed one from a friend, swallowed a Valium (which I never take), and more or less zonked my way through the wedding.

  Actually it was a very sweet ceremony. We got married in Beverly Hills at the home of good friends, the noted film and television producer Leonard Goldberg and his wife, Wendy. A few other friends scrambled to make it from New York, and there were quite a few pals from California. My dear and trusted agent, Lee Stevens, gave me away. Jackie was my maid of honor. Beverly Sills, the famed soprano, who was very close to me, read Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet “How Do I Love Thee?” Jackie and a friend of hers sang “That’s What Friends Are For.” It was all extremely touching and lovely.

  As it turned out, the marriage was nice, too, for quite a few years. Because we had gotten married so quickly we decided to have a big party that fall in New York at the Pierre. I spent our entire honeymoon in the South of France seating and reseating the tables. Every time I finished a table somebody dropped
in or dropped out and I had to redo the table. What honeymoon? All I was doing was tables. (I have learned since that you seat the tables no earlier than the day before the party.)

  It was the grandest, most elegant party anyone could ever have had. We hired a party designer who turned the hotel’s grand ballroom into an arbor of beauty, festooned with garlands of sweet-smelling flowers and centerpieces of roses, orchids, and tulips on each table. Three hundred people came, from Brooke Astor and Mary and Laurance Rockefeller to my old girlfriends from college and their husbands. All my New York friends and colleagues came, as did Merv’s pals and business associates from Los Angeles and, of course, both of our families. Everyone got along. There was singing and dancing, champagne and laughter. Howard Keel, the great baritone and onetime star of Kiss Me, Kate was then appearing on Merv’s show Dallas, and he sang a beautiful love song dedicated to me that night. Only he sang it to the wrong person. He sang it to my cousin Lorraine, who looks a lot like me and was sitting at the same table. She was thrilled.

  The only shadow over the wedding party was provided by the Wall Street Journal, which, two weeks before, had run a front-page story dredging up all the old stuff about Merv’s association with the Mafia. But it was only a tiny shadow. Merv and his partner had settled the libel suit against Penthouse out of court before we married. Merv even had proof that the allegations of his links to organized crime were false. Bob Guccione, the owner of Penthouse, had written him a letter saying the magazine had not meant to imply that Merv was a member of the Mob.

  Nonetheless I had to deal with the article, and I did, with my toast at the party. “I would like to thank the Wall Street Journal for underwriting tonight’s party,” I said. “I wish they’d had to arrange tonight’s seating.” Everybody laughed and everyone then accepted Merv.

  Merv sold his apartment at the Pierre after we married, and together we bought a beautiful apartment where I live to this day. I finally got away from the orange kitchen.

  As for my poor, ailing mother, her health continued to slip away bit by bit. Sadly, she wasn’t even able to come to the party in New York. She barely knew me. Yet she was still the mother I adored, the mother who put bows in my hair when I was a child, who cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner for my sister and me and lavished love on both of us. This is the woman who used to tell me when I was a child that she wished she had six of me. As I grew older, whenever I had to leave her, she would hold my face and kiss me over and over again and tell me how much she loved me. Yes, she became a depressed, unhappy woman in her later years. Yes, she wasn’t easy to be with. But with all the sadness in her life, I could never really blame her. She saw the cup half empty. She made me determined to try to see it half full.

  She died in June 1988 at the age of ninety-one. I was in California for my daughter’s twentieth birthday. Jackie was going through a very difficult time, and Merv and I were giving her a party. I felt it important that I be there, but I was terribly torn. My mother seemed to be getting weaker, although her doctors didn’t consider her condition critical. Then, while I was in California, she slipped into a coma. My cousin Selig, of whom my mother was very fond, went to see her, and he advised me not to fly back to New York. “She won’t even know you’re here,” he said. So, against my better judgment, I stayed in California for my daughter’s party. Maybe my mother wouldn’t have known I was there, but I’d have known I was there. I’m sick of telling you how guilty I feel. Suffice it to say that to this day I can’t bear to watch a film in which an older person dies in his or her child’s arms. I dream about my mother all the time.

  We buried her in Florida. Standing in the cemetery, looking at my father’s and my sister’s graves and then burying my mother, I realized that, after all those years of worry and responsibility, I was finally, finally free. But it didn’t give me a sense of exhilaration. There was a touch of relief, but mostly there was sadness and regret.

  I look often at a favorite photograph I have of my parents and sister that sits on a table in my apartment. It was taken many years ago at the Latin Quarter. Jackie is blond and smiling. My mother and father are smiling, too. It was a happy moment, before the series of sad and difficult events that followed. I treasure that moment. When I think back on my family life, there were not nearly enough of them.

  The Hardest Chapter to Write

  OF ALL THE CHAPTERS in this book, this is the hardest for me to write. I think it should be a chapter of its own because if my sister, Jackie, was the centerpiece of my youth, my daughter, Jackie, is the centerpiece of my adult life. There is another, perhaps more important reason.

  I love my daughter more than I love anyone in the world, always have, but when she reached adolescence our life together became extremely difficult. I would probably not have written about this at all, but Jackie feels that it is very important for people to understand what she and I went through because, she hopes, it may help others. Her thought is that if we could make it, and we did, it may give hope to other parents who are struggling with their own adolescents’ hard-to-understand emotions and rebellion. It may also help working mothers feel less guilty, because when your child is in trouble, the first thing you do is blame yourself. A troubled child can be from any family, but I think working mothers, like myself, feel the pressure even more keenly. And so I am sharing our most painful years—which, in truth, I would rather not remember.

  I am not sure how Lee and I getting divorced affected Jackie. She was only four at the time and says she does not remember how she felt. She never heard us arguing, because we never did. It was just that suddenly her father wasn’t living at home anymore. We carefully went through the rote that most divorcing parents do. “We both love you, darling. Our separation has nothing to do with you. You did nothing bad. We both will continue to see you, etc., etc.” Jackie seemed to take all this in stride.

  What actually happened was that her relationship with her father was never the same. Lee loved Jackie very much and saw her at least twice a week. He took her on wonderful vacations, skiing trips in winter, pretty houses in the summers, and one August, he even took her to Venice, Italy. But she never felt close to him.

  Jackie was nineteen when Lee died. Today she says she regrets that she didn’t know her father better. His photograph is in her home, but although I never remember saying a bad word about him because there were no bad words to say, I could not help her accept and enjoy him. “He tries too hard,” she would tell me. “He lectures me.” Indeed, the time came when there was a good deal to lecture her about.

  As a little girl Jackie could not have been more adorable. We played games together in the afternoon, took baths together. We spent almost every weekend together, often with Shirley, who adored her almost as much as I did. Summers, when Jackie wasn’t with Lee, I, too, rented a house on Long Island. My parents and my sister visited, and they couldn’t keep their hands off her. My father took Jackie for walks in her stroller and enjoyed his little granddaughter as I don’t remember him enjoying my sister and me. It gave me great pleasure.

  I never did know how little Jackie felt about being named after big Jackie, especially when my daughter was old enough to realize that her aunt wasn’t as smart as she was. But I thought my Jackie had a pretty happy childhood. She doesn’t seem to think so.

  Jackie was never with an unfamiliar babysitter. If I was away either Zelle or Icodel—or both—were with her. But in spite of all the continuity of this love and attention, Jackie grew up with no sense of self. Her theory is that almost every adopted child feels a sense of loss and suffers from what she describes as “inner abandonment.” This is something, she thinks, an adopted child lives with her whole life.

  Add to this, Jackie was exceptionally tall. When she was about two, my then assistant, the aforementioned Mary Hornickel, measured Jackie’s height and said if you double the height of a two-year-old, you will know how tall she will be. Jackie measured more than three feet then. I was furious with Mary. But indeed Jackie is now al
most six feet one. She is also very beautiful, with those big blue eyes, a glorious smile with one dimple in her cheek. We used to joke with Jackie that we could only afford one dimple. But striking as she was, Jackie only felt big and awkward.

  In addition to the effects of the divorce, there was my traveling not only around the United States but to France, Germany, the Middle East, China—everywhere. True, Jackie always had Icodel and Zelle to come home to from playdates or school, but did my working and traveling make a difference to her sense of security? When she was a little girl I would take her in my bed many nights, which we both loved. Then I would carry her into her own bed at 5:00 a.m. when I went off to work. I never saw her at breakfast time, except on weekends, and never took her to school, but I also never missed a school event or any special occasion. Every birthday was celebrated with great love and attention. Still, I will always have the doubts most working mothers, certainly of my generation, felt.

  There was also the question of my growing celebrity. I never realized that it would make a difference to Jackie. I had the same friends, none of whom were celebrities. We lived comfortably but not luxuriously. Our home, it seemed to me, was very normal. Still, Jackie now says she never really knew if a school friend liked her or liked the fact that I was her mother. It took her almost her whole life, until she had accomplished so much on her own, to come to terms with her identity.

  I may have unwittingly contributed to her confusion. From the time Jackie was a tiny baby, I vowed to myself that I would not burden her with any of my problems or frustrations. I would not be like my own mother, who confided in me probably too much. I would keep my problems to myself. And I did. But you know, it is probably true that as much as you try to profit from your parents’ mistakes, you make others they didn’t make. By not telling Jackie my problems, challenges, hurdles, I perhaps did her harm, for she didn’t realize that I, too, suffered sometimes. Instead she grew up feeling that she just couldn’t begin to compete with what she saw as my accomplishments. She didn’t know until she was an adult that there were also prices I had to pay. She certainly didn’t know that as a child.